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Fakes and ale

NORMA CLARKE

Pete Brown SHAKESPEARE’S LOCAL Six centuries of history seen through one extraordinary pub 384pp. Macmillan. £16.99. 978 0 230 76126 1

Published: 22 April 2013

I
n the shadow of the Shard, through a narrow entrance off Borough High Street,
stands the George Inn, London’s last surviving galleried coaching inn. Pete
Brown calls it Shakespeare’s local, but admits he can’t prove that
Shakespeare drank there when living and working in Southwark. Shakespeare
omitted to immortalize the George in the way Chaucer did its neighbour, the
Tabard, in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales: “Befell that, in
that season, on a day / In Southwark, at the Tabard, as I lay”. Chaucer even
names the landlord, Harry Bailly – listed as “ostyler” in local records for
1380–81. Dickens similarly failed to set any scenes at the George,
preferring the White Hart in The Pickwick Papers, and nostalgically
summing up the rest of Borough’s inns as “great, rambling, queer old places
. . . with galleries, and passages, and staircases, wide enough and
antiquated enough, to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories”.

Discouraged but not deterred, Brown sets out on a beer-lover’s selective
history of Southwark, loosely linked to the history of the George Inn. His
reason for choosing the George over its more famous neighbours is simple: it
was “the last man standing” after the Blitz flattened most of the other
inns, taverns and alehouses that had for centuries lined the road leading to
London Bridge and the City.

In its heyday it was at once a coach station, luxury hotel, office block,
warehouse and pub There was an inn on the site at least as early as
1450 and probably earlier. (Chaucer’s pilgrims in 1380 had choices for where
to stay.) Destroyed in the Great Fire of Southwark in 1676, the George was
rebuilt “on the old plan” a year later. It was vast, though not unusual in
that respect – there were seven or eight other inns of similar size on
Borough High Street, as well as numerous smaller establishments. Its long
inn-yard and extensive stabling meant it could accommodate both wagons and
stagecoaches, and in its heyday it was at once a coach station, luxury
hotel, office block, warehouse and pub. From early morning till late in the
evening, horse-drawn traffic came and went with the accompanying din and
smells, dust, mud and manure. The railway age put an end to the bustle and
much of the 1677 building was demolished in the late nineteenth century. The
question of discrepancies between what survives and what is being celebrated
becomes one of the structural underpinnings of the book.

Brown follows the history of the George Inn through changes to the building
and, when possible, through the personalities of the landlords and
landladies. He is open about his dependence on previous writers. His
colloquial tone is pitched to suggest a self-taught bloke in a pub whose
enthusiasm leads him into byways of research where he knows few others wish
to follow; hence, he must fix their attention by outbreaks of facetiousness
and exclamatory twists in the narrative. This can be wearing, as are the
invented dialogues which graft modern jargon on to imagined Elizabethan
scenarios – “I’m blue-skying, here, just trying to push ye envelope” – and
the relentlessly chatty footnotes. But when he relaxes, Brown is
entertaining and informative.

Across the river and beyond the City’s regulatory sphere, Southwark was famous
for providing entertainment: brothels, theatres, prize-fighting,
cock-fighting, bear-baiting – for which the modern equivalents might be the
London Dungeon or the Clink Prison Museum with their grisly recreations of
torture and medieval surgery. It had many industries of note, most of them
malodorous: leather tanning, soap boiling, vinegar- and glass-making, cocoa
milling, shoepolish and hat-making. (In 1841, 3,500 hat companies in
Southwark employed some 23,000 people.) Southwark ale was distinctively
strong. Hops smelled pleasantly enough when warehoused in inn-yards, less so
when brewing. At the large Anchor brewery, owned in the eighteenth century
by Samuel Johnson’s friend Henry Thrale, the first industrial beer was
invented. “Intire Porter” was produced on a large enough scale to make it
more economic for inns and alehouses to buy rather than brew their own. When
the brewery was put up for sale after Thrale’s death, Johnson declared they
were not selling boilers and vats but “the potentiality of growing rich
beyond the dreams of avarice”. He was not wrong.

The railway age put an end to the bustle

Little of such wealth trickled down to the mass population of Southwark who
had the reputation of being thieves, prostitutes and hard-faced,
heavy-drinking villains. Prisons were numerous too; Brown notes the
Marshalsea further south on Borough High Street for its association with
Dickens, whose father was imprisoned there. Dickens is the key figure in the
book’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, not because of any actual
connection to the George Inn but because the inn was cleverly branded and
marketed as “Dickensian”. Brown deconstructs some of the “Dickens scam”,
cheerfully recounting ancient quarrels about whether Pickwick and Sam Weller
met in the White Hart or the George Inn and reminding us that they never met
at all because “the book WAS MADE UP AND THE CHARACTERS NEVER EXISTED”.

Still a working pub, the George Inn is now owned by the National Trust.
Inevitably, Dickensian associations continue to be cultivated. Among other
artefacts, there is a framed life-insurance policy made out in Dickens’s
name and signed by him. The legend is he left it after borrowing money from
the landlord. In fact, the Sun Life Assurance company gave it to the George
in 1943. It would be interesting to know why, and whether the Blitz had
anything to do with it.

Norma Clarke is Professor of English Literature at Kingston University.
She is the author of The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters, 2004,
and Queen of the Wits: A Life of Laetitia Pilkington, 2008.